


And a Hedgehog in a Pine Tree

by eyra



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Cabin Fic, Cats, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Fluff, Hedgehogs, M/M, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Modern Era, Romance, Slash, Snow, Tea, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Winter, Writer Sirius Black, it's all very Hallmark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:35:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27943130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyra/pseuds/eyra
Summary: The door swings shut behind them, blocking out the howling wind and the bitter chill and instead there's a gently crackling fire and a patchwork sofa and layers and layers of tapestry rugs spread out over an old oak floor. The air is so toasty Sirius could weep, and he can smell chocolate and woodsmoke and something that might be peppermint, and then someone is taking his coat and grinning at him and he thinks, maybe, he did die out there on the icy roads. Maybe this is his own personal Elysium, and as he blinks stupidly at the man in front of him and takes in his freckles and his hat-flattened curls and the way his jumper has little knitted reindeer woven into the pattern, he thinks death maybe isn't so bad, actually.Remus is the owner of a Christmas tree farm deep in the New Forest. Sirius is a curmudgeonly writer who doesn't believe in Christmas. It's snowing, there's a roaring fire, and we all know how this is going to go.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 41
Kudos: 211





	And a Hedgehog in a Pine Tree

**Author's Note:**

> Pure festive fluff. Basically I wasn't feeling as Christmassy as I usually do at this time of year and I hoped that writing this would help. It did! Enjoy! x

"I'm going to die."

Sirius whimpers as he feels the tyres skid again on the icy road; spinning and spinning and only finding purchase right at the last second, narrowly affording him the opportunity to avoid careening into yet another tree that he can barely see through the blizzard and the whited-out windscreen. The wipers are working overtime but barely clearing the glass at this point, and Sirius's hands are sweating where he grips the steering wheel like his life depends on it. Which, he reasons, it probably does.

"Why can't you just have a fake tree like a normal person?" he whines to the empty car, and tentatively taps his foot on the accelerator again, letting out a long, slow breath when the tyres, mercifully, find their tread in the snow and the Range Rover begins to creep forwards, back onto the left-hand side of the road. He curses James for the hundredth time that day, and then curses himself for trying to be a good friend and a good godfather when really he should've just stayed at home in bed. He might've lived long enough to actually see Christmas Day, that way.

"It's gone," a frantic James had snapped down the phone earlier that morning, followed by a desperate thudding that Sirius suspected was James kicking the boiler. "Totally gone. It's barely a year old!"

"Alright, don't panic," Sirius had said, and been at quite a loss as to what to suggest; he could barely change an empty loo roll, never mind offer any actual plumbing advice. "Have you called the... boiler... people?" he'd suggested tentatively, cringing at his own incompetence. Really it should be Lily sorting all this out. Lily was a properly functioning adult - the only one amongst them who was - and could probably fix the boiler herself in ten minutes with Harry on one hip and her tool belt slung across the other. But Lily was away at Petunia's for the weekend, attending her nephew's christening under protest, and James had Harry, and now a broken boiler, and no support whatsoever from Sirius.

"Yes," James had snapped again, and Sirius could hear Harry wailing at the other end of the phone. "But they can't get here until this afternoon, which is just bloody perfect and now Harry's having an absolute meltdown because I promised him we'd go get this bloody tree today because he's desperate to get the tinsel out. Honestly, mate, you might be onto something with this whole avoiding Christmas approach. Maybe it's not bloody worth it."

"I can go get the tree," Sirius had offered wildly, and James had almost cried with relief.

_"I can go get the tree,"_ Sirius parrots now in a scathing voice, squinting through the windscreen and shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He can feel his t-shirt sticking horribly to his back under his jumper. "I can drive three fucking hours in a fucking blizzard to get a fucking Christmas tree for you. Absolutely vital that I do that for you, James."

In fairness to James, he reasons, and in testament to his own utter stupidity, there had been no reason whatsoever for him to drive all the way out here. James _had_ wanted, before the boiler incident, to come out here with Harry because this was where James and his parents used to come way back when; an honest-to-god Christmas tree farm out in the New Forest where you can cut down your own tree and haul it onto the roof of your own car and lose your own toes to frostbite and Sirius can't fathom why anyone would want to do any of those things, but James is a big softie and had been going on about the experience and the nostalgia and the magic of the season, and Sirius had rolled his eyes and told him to have fun. And it's not that he can't see the appeal for Harry: of course a kid would love coming out to a forest and running in the snow up the avenues between the pines dusted with frost. They've probably got reindeer or something, or a big fat man dressed as Santa. And of course a kid would love that, and that's all fine; obviously he, of all people, understands that. It's just that Sirius, historically, doesn't really _do_ Christmas; he has the turkey and the crackers and the silly paper hats, but it's all at James and Lily's insistence and if it wasn't for them he truly wouldn't bother with the whole thing, and that's exactly why he should've just driven twenty minutes down the road to James's nearest garden centre and picked up a tree there. James wouldn't have cared, so long as they had a tree for Harry, and Sirius wouldn't be out here in the middle of nowhere wondering if he should try dictate his funeral arrangements to Siri, just in case. But the morning had been a blur, and James had been flapping, and Harry had been screaming bloody murder, and Sirius hadn't been thinking as he'd taken the keys to James's car and assured him he'd sort the tree and merrily driven off down the motorway and out into the forest in the middle of the worst blizzard the country's seen in a decade.

"Actually going to die," he whispers to himself now, and each heart-stopping mile creeps by and Sirius tries not to think about how the storm is undoubtedly getting worse and even if he gets the stupid tree he's only going to have to drive all the way back up this road and the snow will be even thicker then and the road will be even icier and maybe he should just sleep in the car, and risk the frostbite and the forest monsters. And then he inches the car round a corner, and squints through the flurries up ahead, and nearly sobs in relief when he makes out the snowy outline of a great wooden arch off the side of the road, welcoming him to his final, perilous destination. His heart is once again in his throat as the car heaves itself up a gentle slope between the trees and rolls into what he assumes is the car park, and then he switches off the ignition, closes his eyes, and lets his head thud against the sweaty leather of the steering wheel.

"Hate you, James," he murmurs, feeling utterly spent. "Hate you so much."

He thinks, in hindsight, that he actually did quite well not to scream like a baby when the knock on the window came, frayed as his fragile nerves already were. As it is, he simply lets out a sort of startled bark, and shoots upright in his seat, and it takes him a good few seconds to gather himself enough to roll the window down and squint out into the blizzard.

"Sorry!" shouts a voice from behind a thick woollen scarf dusted with snow, and all Sirius can make out are a pair of big brown eyes smiling at him from behind extraordinarily long eyelashes and the rim of a bobble hat pulled low against the storm. "Didn't mean to scare you!"

"I'm here for a tree," Sirius shouts stupidly out into the wind, and isn't sure what's happening. He's getting snow all over his jeans through the open window.

The stranger laughs; a ringing, pealing thing, bright as bells, muffled by the heavy scarf. "Yes, people usually are," they say, and then: "Do you want to come wait inside until we can actually see the trees?"

It sounds, Sirius thinks, like an eminently sensible suggestion, so he nods dumbly and zips up his woefully inadequate jacket before stepping out into the storm. Directly onto a patch of ice. His feet disappear from under him, and just as he prepares for his arse to make contact with the frozen ground there's a gloved hand catching him by the arm and pulling him back upright, and he's sure he can hear that laugh again, but then it's carried away on the wind and he's being steered gently towards a little snow-topped cabin across the other side of the car park, and ushered inside.

It's sanctuary. The door swings shut behind them, blocking out the howling wind and the bitter chill and instead there's a gently crackling fire and a patchwork sofa and layers and layers of tapestry rugs spread out over an old oak floor. The air is so toasty Sirius could weep, and he can smell chocolate and woodsmoke and something that might be peppermint, and then someone is taking his coat and grinning at him and he wonders, maybe, if he did die out there on the roads. Maybe this is his own personal Elysium, and as he blinks stupidly at the man in front of him and takes in his freckles and his hat-flattened curls and the way his jumper has little knitted reindeer woven into the pattern, he thinks maybe death isn't so bad, actually.

"You alright?" the man asks, still smiling at him, and Sirius nods dumbly.

"Think so," he says, and the man laughs, and nods back.

"Tea?"

"Uh," Sirius mumbles, watching the man pad across the small room to a little old kettle on a rickety wooden table in the corner. "Sure."

"I've not seen it this bad in years," says the man, as he pulls a couple of mugs from a shelf and flicks the switch on the kettle. "I'm amazed you even made it out here."

"I almost didn't."

There's a silence that's neither comfortable nor uncomfortable - just the gentle sound of the urn boiling and the low hum of the wind outside the cabin - and Sirius takes the opportunity to peer around his new-found refuge. The walls are all unfinished timber, warm and old and glowing in the light of the log fire that dances merrily in the grate. There are photographs everywhere; smiling families and children and great, towering Christmas trees, and near the door, a small counter with an old, mechanical till, and the rest of it decked with ornaments and stars and expertly-whittled figurines on little hanging loops of twine; reindeer and robins and pairs of twin turtle doves. And the man standing across from him at the rickety wooden table, all knitted jumper and baggy blue jeans and thick, woollen socks worn under the snowy boots he'd heeled off at the door.

"Honey?"

Sirius blinks.

"Pardon?" he says flatly.

"Do you take honey?" the man asks politely, waving a small jar and a spoon in Sirius's direction. "In your tea?"

"Oh," Sirius says. "Yes, please." He doesn't. He's never in his life had honey in his tea. He's fairly certain that's something only grandmas and anthropomorphised woodland animals do in books, and he makes a mental note to look into that, and then his mind is wandering off down a snowy spruce-lined path and thinking about a polite young hedgehog who wears knitted jumpers and lives alone in a little log cabin hewn from the stump of a pine tree, where there's always a warm hearth and honey for tea.

"Here you go," prompts the man, and Sirius waves the hedgehog away and takes the mug with a grateful smile.

"Thank you," he says, and then, remembering his manners, offers his other hand to the man. "I'm Sirius."

"Remus," he gets in return, and another grin, and Sirius thinks the name suits that little hedgehog in the woods, and he really should remember this because Marlene would love it. 

"You must really want a tree," Remus says, breaking Sirius's chain of thought. "To come all the way out here in this."

Sirius shakes his head.

"It's not even for me," he says, taking a sip of his tea; it's like nectar, and Sirius feels his nerves from the road steadying with every drop. "I never bother. But my friend was meant to be coming with his kid, but then the boiler broke, and Lily was away, so I ended up volunteering to sort the fucking tree because Harry insisted that they get one this weekend, and..." he shrugs, blowing out a long, tired breath. "Nearly killed me."

"How far have you come?" Remus asks, grinning, as he ushers Sirius onto the patchwork sofa under the window and takes a seat opposite in a big, squashy armchair covered with a tartan blanket.

"Greenwich."

Remus blinks at him over the rim of his mug.

"You've driven all the way from Greenwich, in this?" he asks, glancing up out of the window at the storm still raging outside.

"Yep," Sirius says. "Don't say it."

"Alright," Remus smiles, sipping his tea.

"James says he used to come here when he was young," Sirius explains, sinking back into the sofa. "He says every year he'd come out here with his parents and chop down a tree."

"Oh, really?" Remus asks brightly. "When would that have been? We've been here for ages; maybe I've met him."

Sirius does the maths in his head, and wonders who _"we"_ constitutes, and tries not to think too much on a wife or girlfriend lingering up at a house on the other side of the farm, and equally tries not to think too much on why the idea irks him so much. Remus nods excitedly at the dates, and sets his tea down on a roughly-hewn wooden end table to go pull a great, leather-bound album from a shelf behind the counter. There's a year etched along the spine, and Remus drops the book in Sirius's lap and tells him to have a flick through and sure enough, twenty winters ago, there's James and Fleamont standing proudly on either side of a towering fir tree, spades in hand.

"I feel like I remember him, actually," Remus smiles, peering at the photograph when Sirius points him out. "They had a dog, I think."

"They did have a dog!" Sirius nods, feeling unreasonably pleased at the connection and the fact that he and Remus had all but crossed paths, in a sense, many years previous. He remembers the towering trees that used to fill the Potters' hallway at Christmastime, groaning with baubles and tinsel and ugly, handmade ornaments that James had crafted and Euphemia insisted be brought out every year, and he finds it strangely thrilling to think that those very trees had been presided over by the smiling, freckled man now sitting across from him.

"A Labrador."

"That's right," Sirius smiles, taking one last look at the photograph before pushing the album aside. "Terence, they called him."

"I think he ate my dad's hat one year," says Remus, and Sirius laughs.

"That sounds like him," he says. 

"You never came out with them?" Remus asks, looking at Sirius over his mug again, and Sirius thinks he feels himself blush. Which is interesting.

"No," he shakes his head, offering Remus a tight smile. "My family didn't really do Christmas. I don't really do Christmas."

"Sounds like a challenge," Remus says coyly, and Sirius gulps down another bracing swig of his tea. They lapse into another silence then, marginally more comfortable than the last, and Sirius swallows down the rest of his drink as Remus stands to go peer out of the window behind the low wooden counter.

"Really doesn't look to be getting any better," he says softly, looking over at Sirius apologetically. "You're welcome to hang around until it does, though?"

Usually, Sirius would be panicking at that. Usually, Sirius would be tutting, and sighing, and tapping away at his phone and muttering to himself about work and deadlines and how none of this is ideal, actually, because he wasn't even supposed to come out today and Marlene will have his neck if he doesn't get some pages across to her soon and the reception here isn't great so it's going to be difficult to get in touch with anyone to let them know what's going on and James will probably assume he's died, come to think of it, and could Remus just be a dear and go chop down a stupid tree anyway so that Sirius can be on his way?

But, curiously, Sirius finds that his usual self is conveniently absent today; on leave, or temporarily vaporised following the sheer trauma of the journey here, and what's left is a sort of vague, happy acceptance that this is where he is, and there's no going anywhere in this weather, and he'll just have to hunker down here for the morning and wait it out. With Remus.

And that all seems fine, actually.

Remus makes them another round of tea as the snow continues to pile up at the window, and then pulls out an old laptop from under the counter and starts tapping away quietly in the corner, and Sirius sinks further into the patchwork sofa and kicks his boots off and lets his socked feet be warmed by the crackling fire. His eyes fall shut at some point, lulled pleasantly downwards by the warmth and the tea and the way the room still smells a bit like chocolate, and he's somewhere between the cabin and sound asleep when he finds himself thinking about that little hedgehog again, and how the hedgehog has albums full of pictures of all his woodland friends, and how every Christmas he decorates the young spruce saplings outside his pine-tree cabin and dresses them in lights and fir cones and snowflakes for all the forest to enjoy.

Something pokes him gently in his arm, and he drags himself back to wakefulness, shuffling upright on the sofa.

"Hedgehog," he mumbles blearily, then blinks up to see Remus standing over him.

"Hedgehog?" Remus says blankly, and there's a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

"Erm, yes," Sirius mutters clumsily, feeling his cheeks flush as he pushes himself up from the sofa. "Quite." He blinks stupidly at Remus, both of them standing there in their socked feet on the tapestry rug, and then shakes himself and clears his throat. "No, sorry, I erm... didn't mean to fall asleep."

"Think you needed it after that drive," Remus grins, and then: "It really isn't getting any better outside." He glances to the window, looking apologetic again, and Sirius follows his gaze to see that the car park outside is now completely whited-out; the window sill stacked high with snow, drifts sloping up against the glass and obscuring everything, like the cabin now exists only within a great, white marshmallow or something.

"It's not, is it?" Sirius says vaguely, wandering over to the window and peering through, seeing nothing at all. "Can't even see the bloody car."

He turns to find Remus still standing gingerly by the sofa, looking hesitant.

"I don't think you should be driving back in this," he says, and Sirius feels something spark curiously inside his chest. Probably all the honey in the tea, he thinks.

"No," he agrees faintly, not moving from his spot by the window. "No, I probably shouldn't."

"There's a spare room at the house," Remus says, with - Sirius fancies - a sort of forced easiness, stuffing his hands awkwardly into his jeans pockets. "You could stay here, just for tonight."

Sirius regards him for a moment, and notes, at the back of his mind, that this whole moment feels much more pivotal than it actually is; he would quite literally die if he attempted to drive home now, and the car is probably snowed under anyway so it's not like he could sleep there, and he wouldn't bet on there being any hotels nearby, so it is, in effect, the only possible solution. But it still feels like something else, and Sirius isn't sure what that is. 

"Alright," he says quietly, tucking his hands into his own pockets, mirroring Remus from across the cabin. "And your, erm," he hedges, clearing his throat. "Your... wife, wouldn't mind?"

Remus stares at him.

"Well, I don't know about a wife," he says slowly, and Sirius feels that little kernel inside him spark again, all honey and crackling fire. "But my cat would probably be glad of the company."

Sirius smiles dumbly at that, and nods, and forgets to thank Remus for the offer entirely until they're pulling their coats back on and Remus is stuffing his feet into his boots, the snow from earlier melted into a little puddle on the doormat. 

"Thank you," Sirius blurts, fastening his own shoes and standing awkwardly by the threshold in front of Remus, hands tucked back in his pockets for lack of knowing what else to do with them. "For letting me stay."

"Of course," Remus shrugs, finishing tugging on his boots before standing and smiling at Sirius. "Anytime."

Sirius isn't really sure what that means, so they lapse into another momentary silence which this time feels strange and electric, and then Sirius needs - for whatever reason - to look away, so he glances up, and freezes. Above them, above the threshold, pinned to a low beam and wrapped in a red ribbon, is a little bunch of mistletoe; mint-green buds and snowdrop berries, two or three fresh little sprigs floating there over the doorway. Temptingly.

"Oh," Remus says flatly, following his gaze. "Ignore that," he blurts, clearing his throat and reaching for the door handle. "Customers like it. It's..." he shakes his head, offering Sirius an unreadable smile. "Ready?"

"For what?" Sirius says. There's a rushing in his ears; it could be the blizzard on the other side of the cabin walls. It could be something else entirely.

"To go outside," Remus prompts, and pulls his own scarf up higher around his cheeks. "It's about a fifteen minute walk up to the house."

Sirius just nods, and swallows past whatever strange thing is now happening in his oesophagus, and follows Remus out into the cold.

He only falls once; in the car park again, on another patch of ice like the one that tripped him up earlier, and again Remus catches him by the arm and pulls him up and they trudge onward, past a great mound of snow that Sirius thinks might once have been James's car, and then into a small, quiet patch of woodland where their footsteps crunch on the frozen ground and startle squirrels from their perches, scurrying up icy trunks and into warm nests in the hollows of the great, creaking pines. At the other side of the copse is a vast field of spruces, six and seven and ten foot tall, some of them, and Remus leads them along a winding path that rounds a hillock and brings them to the edge of another stretch of forest, bigger and wilder and darker than the last. Sirius follows Remus into the trees, all the while clutching his tragically unsuitable jacket around himself, his hair whipping about him in the wind, icy strands lashing at his frozen cheeks. And finally, just beyond the treeline at the edge of the woods, Sirius sees another cabin; two storeys tall, with snow-covered steps leading up to a red front door, and a storybook chimney jutting up from the frosted roof and sending plumes of woodsmoke high into the trees above.

It's utterly charming inside. Sirius knew it would be; Remus pushes open the door, and ushers Sirius in before him, and Sirius toes off his boots in a cheerily-lit hallway with a dark wooden floor and walls the colour of conifers. There are picture frames on every surface, lamps on every table casting a warm, welcoming glow about the place, and when Remus toes the door closed behind them it's to the sound of a faint tip-tapping as a little grey cat rounds the corner of the staircase and pads over to greet them.

"That's George," Remus says, taking Sirius's jacket from him and hanging it, next to his own, on an old wrought iron peg at the end of the hall. "He's very friendly."

"I can see that," murmurs Sirius, smiling as he bends down to stroke the cat as it winds itself in and out of the space between Sirius's ankles. "Hello, George."

He feels Remus watching them, then, and it's a long moment before either of them says anything, but then George trots away back down the hall and Sirius stands, and Remus smiles at him, and Sirius can't really feel his nose. For whatever reason.

"You'll probably want to call someone."

"What?" Sirius says. He can still smell chocolate, like at the cabin, and he wonders if maybe it's Remus that he's smelling, and how curious that Remus should smell like chocolate. Perhaps the hedgehog in the story should smell like chocolate, too, he thinks.

"James?" Remus prompts, gesturing to an old rotary dial landline at the foot of the stairs. "You'll not get signal out here, but you can call him on that if you like."

James picks up after nine rings, and still sounds harried and fraught, and for a moment seems to have forgotten all about the tree and asks dumbly why Sirius is spending the night in the New Forest, of all places.

"Because," says Sirius, pinching the bridge of his nose and taking a deep, steadying breath. "I drove all the way here in what can only be described as an apocalyptic snowstorm in order to procure a tree, for you and your spawn, that apparently could not wait until next weekend."

"Oh, right," James answers distractedly. Sirius can hear a godawful racket in the background that sounds very much like Harry's gotten into the pan drawer again, and he's silently and monumentally thankful that he's actually stuck here, not there, with only the soft sound of George's paws on the wood floor and Remus's quiet bustling in the next room. "S'pose we'll just get the fake one down from the loft, then."

Sirius hangs up. "Tosser," he mutters.

"Hmm?"

He looks down the hall, and sees Remus sticking his head round a doorframe, looking at him inquisitively. His cheeks are all red from the cold.

"Oh, nothing," Sirius sighs, drawing a tired hand down across his face. "Just James being a tosser."

Remus grins. "How is he?" he asks over his shoulder as Sirius follows him into what turns out to be a long, busy kitchen, all mismatched cupboards and scrubbed wooden table and a huge, fat fir tree at the far end, stuffed with baubles and fairy lights and a wooden star on the highest branch, almost brushing the beams of the ceiling above.

"He's fine," Sirius says, sinking into a chair and resting his elbows on the table as Remus busies himself with something on the stove. It smells like soup. Sirius hopes it's soup. "He's married, now. And run off his feet with an absolute madman of a child."

"Stay-at-home dad?"

"It was his idea. Lily's the breadwinner and I think James thought it'd be eighteen years of putting his feet up and watching the footie."

Remus laughs from over by the cooker, and Sirius watches him reach up to pull a couple of bowls from a cupboard above the counter.

"Not so?"

"Think he really regrets it," Sirius chuckles darkly.

"What about you?"

"Hmm?"

"What do you do?" Remus asks, spooning soup from the pot on the stove into twin bowls and placing one in front of a grateful, waiting Sirius. "Something to do with hedgehogs, from the way you were chatting away earlier in your sleep."

Sirius looks up, stricken, and sees Remus watching him with a wicked grin. He feels himself flush, again, and busies himself with stirring his soup. Which smells divine, he notes through his horror.

"Well, in a way," he murmurs into his bowl, and feels George the cat settle on his feet under the table. "I'm a writer," he says, looking up at Remus, and somehow delighting at the way his eyebrows quirk upwards in what Sirius reads as pleasant surprise. "I write children's books."

"Really?" Remus grins, sounding utterly charmed, and Sirius tries not to preen. He's not usually like this, by any stretch; he's been fiercely guarded about his career since he fell into it three years ago, and he assumes the reticence lies somewhere between how at odds it sits with his admittedly rather curmudgeonly personality, and the chance of it getting back to his parents that their eldest son is not, as intended, a banker, lawyer or doctor, but rather whiles away his days inventing fairy stories about elves and pixies and dragons. And hedgehogs, apparently. He's not embarrassed, per se, he's just still finding his feet with it all, and the idea of Regulus laughing about it with their cousins at the family dinners Sirius stopped going to over a decade ago still smarts more than it probably should.

"It's an accidental career, really," he explains, tasting his soup and finding it absolutely delicious and trying not to think about how Remus is still grinning across the table at him.

"How's that?" Remus asks.

"I always wanted to write," Sirius says, pouring himself a glass of water from the jug Remus has set out for them to share. "But I was writing for The Economist, to start with."

"Oh," says Remus, quirking his eyebrows again. "Bit of a change, then."

"It paid the bills but I wasn't thrilled by any of it," Sirius goes on. He can feel George purring against his socks. "But then Harry came along-"

"James's son?"

"James's son," Sirius nods. "And I found that I was... alright at making up all sorts of nonsense for him."

Remus beams, and Sirius thinks the sheer light of it could melt away the blizzard outside and bring springtime around within mere minutes. 

"Just rubbish, really," he mutters into his soup. "But Harry liked it, and then Lily - Harry's mum - convinced me to write some of it down and send it to an editor friend of hers."

"And now you love it?" Remus prompts, still grinning.

"I weirdly do, yeah," Sirius says, feeling himself give in to the smile pulling at his own lips. "It's ridiculous, and unimportant, but..." he shrugs. "I do sort of love it. And I'm alright at it, which helps."

"I would very much like to read some of your books," Remus says, and Sirius feels silly and helpless when he meets Remus's gaze across the table, and George still snoozes at Sirius's feet, and a fire crackles happily in the next room, and the blizzard rages on outside.

"Anyway," Sirius says quietly at length, finishing the last of his soup and leaning back in his chair. "What about you?"

"What about me?" Remus smiles, gathering their bowls up and knocking the kettle on as he pulls a pair of mugs from another cupboard by the sink.

"Have you always been in the Christmas tree business?"

Remus laughs. "Literally since I was born."

Sirius watches him drop teabags into a spruce-green teapot, and carry a biscuit jar in the shape of a pine cone over to the table, and it's all just perfect, really.

"It was just me and my dad, from the start," Remus goes on, and Sirius makes a note of something, somewhere. Maybe the hedgehog in the story didn't have a mother, and maybe that's really sad, but Sirius doesn't press it. The hedgehog seems happy now, besides. "I went away to uni, eventually," Remus is saying, bringing the teapot over. "Forestry Management, of course."

"Of course," Sirius nods, taking his mug of tea when Remus pours it for him and helping himself to a biscuit from the jar. It's shaped like a star and tastes of spiced apples.

"And I think my dad wanted me to go do something else, really," Remus says through his own mouthful of biscuit. "Something... bigger, maybe. But I just couldn't wait to get back here."

"I don't blame you," Sirius says without really thinking, but finds he utterly means it, and they lapse into a silence that's definitely comfortable, both of them watching the snow outside as the sky begins to darken and the long night draws in. Remus gets up at one point to go add another log to the fire, and Sirius follows him into a cosy, cramped snug at the end of the hall, and they sink into twin armchairs in front of the hearth and chat quietly about this and that. How Remus's dad bought the farm when Remus was just a year old, and how they would spend every summer building and planting and every winter felling the trees and sending them off all over the country, up to Durham and down to Land's End and everywhere in between. The soil here is what makes the difference, Remus explains, and you couldn't grow spruces like this just anywhere. They talk about school, and how Remus hated it because he can't bear to be indoors for that long, and how Sirius hated it too until he met James and found a new family with him. They talk about Fleamont, and Euphemia, and then they talk about how Remus's dad isn't here anymore, but how Remus stays anyway, because he couldn't bear to be anywhere else.

"Are you close with your parents?" Remus asks late in the evening, when they're tucking into sandwiches from the kitchen and George is stretched out on the rug in front of the crackling fire.

"No," Sirius says bluntly, and then feels like he's being unfair to Remus, and goes on: "I didn't have a very nice childhood. So we don't speak at all."

Remus is quiet for a moment at that, and they both finish their sandwiches, and then Remus pushes another cup of tea into Sirius's hands and says: "That's probably why you're so good at writing children's stories."

"What?" Sirius says, blinking across at Remus and watching as he settles back into his chair, gathering his socked feet up into the seat and pulling his knees close to his chest.

"If you didn't have much of a childhood," Remus says quietly, kindly, as Sirius eyes him warily. "It makes sense that you'd write these stories now. Because maybe you want to help other kids who aren't very happy either."

Sirius thinks, as he stares dumbly over at Remus, that from anyone else he might take that as an affront. He might demand to know what right it was of theirs to make a judgement call on his life like that, on his career, on his childhood. But instead, curiously, he finds that odd little kernel is sparking about in his chest again, and maybe his throat feels a little tight, and maybe Remus has just summed up the past thirty years for Sirius in a way that no therapist or friend or he himself has ever even come close to.

"Maybe that's it," he says quietly, and Remus gives him a small smile, and they drink their tea in silence as the flames dance happily around the glowing spruce branches in the grate of the hearth.

They head upstairs when the woodfire burns back to embers, and take their turns in Remus's one bathroom as George trots happily between the two of them and the wind outside seems to blow itself out, and when Sirius pads down the hallway whilst Remus is cleaning his teeth and looks out of the old, wooden window at the forest outside, he sees just a gentle flurry of flakes floating lazily down over the tops of the trees, catching in the milky light of the moon as it passes through gaps in the snow clouds.

"These might be a bit short on you," he hears Remus quietly behind him, and turns to find him offering up a pair of pyjama bottoms, a t-shirt, and a baggy, knitted jumper, all folded in a neat pile. "But they'll do, I think."

"Thanks," Sirius smiles. They stand there together, in the hallway, in the quiet of the forest, and Sirius thinks back to the cheery sprig of mistletoe hanging on the beam above the threshold in the cabin at the other side of the woods. 

"Well," Remus says, and Sirius watches him.

"Well," he nods.

He's not sure, afterwards, which of them moved first. Something between him leaning down an inch or two without ever planning to, and Remus taking a tentative step towards him on the threadbare carpet of the corridor, and the lingering smell of woodsmoke and chocolate that clings to Remus's curls when Sirius runs a gentle hand through them and Remus presses their lips together. It's glowing, and warm, and feels achingly right and entirely unknown and like a promise of new, bright things, all at once, and somewhere in the back of Sirius's mind he thinks that this is what Christmas morning should feel like. Remus takes another step towards him then, and Sirius pulls him closer still, and how wonderful, he thinks, that a December snowstorm brought him home like this.

Something's shifted inside of Sirius by the time Remus pulls back, and he finds himself hoping, wildly, that the storm has done away with the car altogether; covered it over and buried it and frozen it to the very ground, trapping it there in the ice and Sirius here in the house in the woods, with the crackling fire and the grey cat and Remus standing there looking at him like he's revelation itself.

"I think-" Sirius starts.

"We should probably-" Remus says over him, and they both falter, and grin, and Sirius wonders how he doesn't melt into the carpet with the way Remus is looking at him like that.

"We should probably get some sleep," Sirius says quietly, nodding, and Remus laughs softly.

"Probably," he says, and then he's showing Sirius to a spare room at the other end of the hall, and it's all squashy pillows and tartan blankets and a rickety old oil heater that Remus shows Sirius how to use as George paws playfully at Sirius's ankles.

"So, you should have everything you need," Remus says as he stands in the doorway a moment later, and Sirius stands across the threshold and watches him. "But I'm just down the corridor. If you need anything else."

They both grin stupidly at the implication, and in another life maybe Sirius would've been planning on padding down that same corridor in the early hours, stealing away inside Remus's room and slipping between the sheets with him to do all manner of festive things. It tended to go that way, at school and then at university, and it never meant anything much, and Sirius knows that's exactly why he won't see Remus until the morning. And the thought thrills him.

"Thank you," he says softly, and then Remus is leaning in to press another slow, tender kiss to his lips, and when he leaves with George trotting after him and Sirius pushes the door closed behind them, he wonders, utterly madly, if this isn't the season's way of offering him some small, conciliatory measure of peace.

***

The light streaming through the old glass panes is bright and crisp when Sirius wakes, and it takes him a long moment, warm in his bed, to recall where he is. He smiles into his pillow when he remembers, and fancies he can hear the gentle strain of Christmas music filtering down the hallway from somewhere else in the house. Shaking his head at his own utterly uncharacteristic sappiness, he drags himself out from under the blankets and pulls on his jeans and Remus's baggy jumper from the night before against the chill in the room, and he wanders over to the window to look out at the forest; towering, snow-topped pines reaching up towards a clear blue sky, not a storm cloud in sight, and as beautiful as it is - a perfect December day - Sirius can't help but feel it's a bit of a shame, really.

The music gets louder as he pads downstairs, all pretty strings and plucking lutes playing carols he doesn't recognise but adores immediately, and then there's the smell of honey and tea from the kitchen where he finds Remus busying himself over a pan of eggs.

"Do you like mushrooms?" Remus says lightly from where he's standing by the stove, and it feels - curiously - like the most natural thing in the world for Sirius to cross the kitchen and tuck his chin onto Remus's shoulder.

"I do," he mutters, and they stand there together as Remus adds mushrooms and minds the pans and reaches over to knock the kettle on, and then he's nudging Sirius gently in the stomach with his elbow and telling him to go set the table.

"We should probably see about getting you that tree today," Remus says a while later, as they're tucking into their breakfasts and the fire is crackling happily again in the grate in the next room. "You don't want to have come all this way for nothing."

Sirius looks up to find Remus watching him across the table, a small smile tugging at his lips.

"I don't think I did, did I?" Sirius says quietly.

"No," Remus says softly, grinning in earnest now. "I don't think you did. But," he adds with a sigh, and pauses, and Sirius feels something icy and sharp run down the back of his neck. "If you don't get a tree, James might kill you, so..."

Sirius laughs at that, relaxing back into his chair.

"So we should probably get the tree," he nods.

"Probably."

Sirius watches Remus across the table, both smiling at each other like teenagers, and then he shakes his head helplessly and glances down the kitchen to Remus's tree where it stands cheerily in the corner, all glass ornaments and twinkling lights.

"What do you do for Christmas?" he asks, watching George bat playfully at a low-hanging bauble.

"Oh, we just spend it here," Remus says, and Sirius's gaze snaps back to him. "He's good company," Remus says, nodding at George as he watches him successfully dislodge the bauble and send it skidding off across the floor. "But he's not great at pulling crackers."

Sirius regards Remus, and feels - unexpectedly, unbearably - a great, insurmountable ache pulling at his chest. The thought of Remus, with his jumpers and his freckles and his smile that could light up a village, spending Christmas alone out here in the woods, without his family, without anyone, simply won't do. And it's entirely unlike Sirius to even consider that; Christmas has, truly, always been just another day to him, exceptional only because James insists on his company and Lily insists on buying him gifts and cooking for him and making him wear the silly hats and play the silly games and watch the silly Queen doing her speech at three o'clock. It's always been like that, but only in isolation, and outside of that forty-eight hour period at the Potters' Sirius strictly doesn't think on Christmas or celebrate or make plans with anyone else to do anything at all. But that's suddenly unacceptable, and of course Remus can't stay here alone, and Sirius knows that the story would end with one of the hedgehog's newfound friends from the forest dragging him out of his festive little den and insisting he have a proper Christmas with the rest of the woods, and they'd all live happily ever after, for many Christmases to come. And no other ending in the world would do.

"Come to us for Christmas," he says firmly, and Remus looks at him like he's gone mad.

"I thought you didn't do Christmas?"

"I don't," Sirius admits, nodding. "But James and Lily do. And they insist upon my presence, and I bet James would love to catch up with you, so you should come. We can spend the day there."

He nods again, as if the matter is settled, and takes a confirmatory sip of his tea.

"And what about the night?" Remus asks, and Sirius splutters inelegantly into his mug. He looks up to find Remus grinning at him.

"You can stay at mine," he says quietly. He thinks he has butterflies in his stomach, and he honestly can't recall the last time that happened. It's thrilling.

"Do you have a spare room?" Remus asks innocently.

"Nope," Sirius says. It's a lie; his little townhouse with it's lofty rooms has space enough for the both of them and then some, but it feels like the right thing to say, and Remus is still grinning at him across the table, and Sirius - by some winter miracle he can't yet fathom - finds that he's fervently looking forward to Christmas Day for the first time in his life. And isn't that marvellous, he thinks.

"Alright," says Remus softly, and then they're back to grinning at each other stupidly across the table, and Sirius can't bear how bloody perfect the whole thing is.

"Come on," he says eventually, pushing himself up and piling their plates and empty mugs into the sink. "Let's go get this fucking tree."

"You know, you swear a lot more than I would expect from a children's author," Remus says mildly as he fetches their jackets from the hall.

"I have a really good editor," Sirius says, taking his coat and pulling it on over the jumper of Remus's he's still wearing. "She catches most of the f-bombs."

The road out of the forest must've cleared in the morning sun, Sirius realises, when they emerge from the woods and see two new cars parked up beside the mound of snow that he assumes still covers James's Range Rover. Remus apologises to the small gaggle of families hovering outside the cabin as he hurries to open up, and Sirius is happy to mill around the farm whilst Remus sorts them with spruces and firs and helps one of the dads haul the trees onto the roofs of the waiting cars, and if the sight of Remus effortlessly lifting an eight foot tree over his head does things to Sirius that he's not felt in some time, then it only serves to make the promise of Christmas morning curled up in bed with him in Greenwich all the more appealing, and he feels like a child waiting for Santa to come. An analogy he probably shouldn't pursue, he muses, as he watches Remus lift the second tree, and then the families are trundling away down the lane and they're both grabbing spades and shovels and setting to work on unearthing James's car from beneath the ice. It takes an age, and they're both sweating and aching by the end of it, and then they're heading off back up the hill to finally pick out James's bloody tree. They settle on a tall, bushy thing that Remus assures Sirius is the best of the crop, and when Sirius gets out his credit card in the cabin Remus shoos him away and tells him to tell James that the tree is a preemptive _"thank you"_ for having him round on Christmas Day, and then they're both standing out in the car park again, tree firmly secured atop the Range Rover, and Sirius finds himself reaching out to brush a few errant snowflakes from Remus's curls as Remus grins dopily at him, the bright December sun picking out glints of gold and copper in his ridiculous eyelashes.

"Please be careful on that road," Remus says, seeming happy enough to let Sirius continue his fussing with his hair. "And ring me to let me know you've got home safely."

"I will, I will," Sirius mutters, and then takes a deep, steadying breath, stuffing his hands into his coat pocket. "So you really will come for Christmas?"

"I really will."

"Good," Sirius nods, and grins, and then Remus is stepping forwards and leaning up to press another of his pretty, intoxicating kisses to Sirius's frozen lips, and Sirius thinks, absently, that maybe there is something a little bit magical about Christmas after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I told you: pure fluff. Merry Christmas! x


End file.
